Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Bruce and David did not know each other particularly well at Andover. David was more in my circle of friends than Bruce’s—people who were involved in the school radio station, WPAA, or the school newspaper, the Phillipian, or the Pot Pourri, the yearbook. But Bruce recalled, “Once we realized we were both going to Cornell, we decided, ‘Hey, let’s become roommates.’”

  Bruce was a little ambivalent about actually becoming an architect, and that ambivalence started showing up early in his time at Cornell. Instead of putting in the requisite hours on his architectural studies, Bruce was spending a lot of time at night hanging out with his friends and playing varsity B lacrosse. David Buck, though, seemed very committed to architecture. He “was focusing all of his work, his attention on the architecture, and he was really good at it, too,” Bruce said. There was no shortage of pressure to perform academically and socially. Dave used to stay up very late, designing buildings for his architecture classes. “He was living full-throttle at all times,” Bruce said. “I never got the feeling that he had huge ambitions. It was just because he just wanted to do it to the fullest. He was so much fun to hang out with.” He had joie de vivre. He had that ability to really live life to the fullest, that carpe diem sprit. They would literally go parachuting together, at night. “We were thrill seekers,” Bruce said.

  During his freshman year, Bruce drove a used BMW 2002 tii. He ended up crashing it and then getting a hot new car, a silver Volkswagen Scirocco. Actually, Bruce had been in five car accidents before he was nineteen. He was the driver in two of the wrecks, and his friends were driving in the other three. “We were all driving really fast, and racing each other on the streets,” he said. “And then you add in there the alcohol and marijuana, and it’s a prescription for a crash. I’m really lucky I’m here.” But these near misses did not dissuade Bruce, or David for that matter, from fantasizing about being Grand Prix Formula One race-car drivers. They used to go over to Watkins Glen, twenty-four miles away from Cornell, to watch Niki Lauda race against James Hunt—the longtime Formula One racing rivals. In 1976, Lauda had suffered a horrific crash that almost killed him. He soon returned to Formula One racing despite suffering second-degree burns. His face remained deformed. “We didn’t even really notice that part of it,” Bruce recalled. “We just noticed how cool all of the Formula One race-car drivers were, and it was almost contagious. There were like four of us that all loved racing, and we loved street racing.” Dave didn’t have his own car. “But he used to love being my wingman,” Bruce recalled.

  Besides a love of driving fast, alcohol seemed to be David’s main vice. Bruce remembered how Bucky, as David was affectionately known, would think nothing of downing a bottle of Gordon’s gin. “He would just drink straight from the bottle, like, holy mackerel,” Bruce said.

  Their sophomore year at Cornell, Bruce switched out of the architecture program into liberal arts. His ambivalence about architecture was the cause of the switch, along with the realization that taking courses in history and political science would be a better way for him to get refocused on his dream of becoming president. He had already arranged to work the following summer, 1979, in New Hampshire to help elect his fellow Andover alum George H. W. Bush president. Politically, Bruce thought of himself as an independent, but he became excited about Bush’s prospects for becoming president after his father encouraged him to study his résumé, which included being a congressman, heading up the CIA, serving as the US ambassador to the United Nations, and serving on the Andover board of trustees.

  During their sophomore year, Bruce and David decided to join a fraternity and were soon living at Theta Delta Chi. They decided to buy two queen-sized waterbeds and install them in their room, leaving little space for anything else. “We put them side by side in the room, but they took up the entire room,” Bruce recalled. “There was no place to dress … it was fun as hell. We basically slept in the same big huge waterbed together for a year.”

  Life seemed full of infinite possibilities for Bruce as a future president of the United States, and for David as an architect, designing important buildings. But their gauzy dreams, based on those infinite possibilities, turned into a frightening nightmare on the night of May 16, 1979. Classes at Cornell had ended for the school year, as had most of the exams. Bruce had finished his last exam. His plan was to pack up his Scirocco in two days, head back home to Gladwyne—the seventh richest zip code in the country—and then either drive or fly up to Nashua, New Hampshire, and “work all summer” for Bush. That night, Bruce and David decided to meet a friend, Justus O’Brien, over at Quill and Dagger, a secret club at Cornell that taps its members from the best and the brightest on campus.

  David, Bruce, and Justus drank a bottle of tequila together. “Because why not?” Bruce said. “It was the last lacrosse game, it was summer, Let’s celebrate, it’s a big night, we deserve to live to the fullest, so we did. We drank a lot.” Bruce remembered that Bucky then suggested they all go to Simeon’s, a somewhat classy bar in town. “There’s going to be some people there,” David said. “It’ll be really fun.” The friends drove down the Cornell hill to Simeon’s and drank some more. Then the plan was to continue the fun at Justus’s house, a short ride back up the Cornell hill. David was in the front seat of Bruce’s car. They were set to follow Justus to his house. That’s when Bruce got in his head the idea that he could race Justus. It was 1:47 a.m. “We got in the car, and we chased him back onto campus, and we were on campus … and I came around the corner going really fast—much too fast, because I thought I was a Formula One race-car driver—and came around, and I saw the guy in front of me had his blinker on. And I could swear that he had his blinker on to the right, which means that he was pulling to the right to park along the side of the road.” But Bruce was wrong: The driver of the car in front of him—his new friend Justus O’Brien—had his left blinker on, not his right one. “I came whipping around the corner to the left to pass him, and just at the last minute he pulled left instead,” Bruce recalled. “So I saw his right blinker on, but he pulled left, and right in front of me, and I didn’t even have enough time to put on the brakes. It just hit the front of the car, and my car flipped end-over-end twice, and then landed upside down over a telephone pole. And lights went out, and blood was everywhere, we were both unconscious. The engine came right up into my face. Thank God I was wearing my seat belt—nobody back then was wearing seat belts. That was before there was a law.” (In 1984, New York State became the first state in the country to require that seat belts be worn by everyone in a car.)

  * * *

  JUSTUS O’BRIEN WATCHED THE SCIROCCO hit his Civic and then disappear. “Then I was the only one there,” he said. “I got out of the car. I was stunned, absolutely stunned.” He was uninjured. “Not a scratch,” he continued. The Civic was totaled. He got out of the car and looked around for Bruce and David. He saw them in the flipped-over Scirocco. “The one really horrific memory I have from that evening is looking under and seeing if they were all right or alive and there was just this incredible deathly silence,” he said. “It was just awful. All I could hear was like the drip of—presumably—their blood coming down from the accident. I couldn’t tell the nature of their injuries. I mean obviously I heard afterward what had happened. They were both unconscious.” He called out their names. “They couldn’t respond,” he said.

  In short order, the police arrived on the scene. They gave O’Brien a blanket to wrap himself in. “They were afraid I was going to go into shock of some kind just from the trauma of the accident,” he said. “I was really concerned about both Bruce and David. It wasn’t easy getting them out of the car.” The Jaws of Life were needed to extract them. “I was there for all that,” O’Brien recalled. “They had the Jaws, they cut the door open.” It turned out the injuries were so severe that the nearby Tompkins County hospital could not handle them. “It’s too intense for us,” the Ithaca hospital told the ambulance drivers. Bruce was transported to the Upstate Medical Ce
nter in Syracuse, fifty-seven miles away. The paper reported he had broken his leg and was in “satisfactory” condition. David was also transported by ambulance to Syracuse, to the Crouse Irving Memorial Hospital—the very hospital that Bruce’s ancestors had endowed. The paper reported that the police said David had suffered head injuries and had broken his leg, too, and that the hospital said he was “in critical condition.”

  Bruce and David’s fraternity brothers were reluctant to call their friends’ parents to explain what happened. Bruce recalled that only one of his fraternity brothers—a cocaine dealer—had the guts to do it. “They were chicken,” he recalled. “They didn’t want to call our parents and tell them that we were almost dead, but he actually did. He called my parents and told them.” (This same student was himself killed in a car accident a year later.) Bruce’s father, John, called the Ithaca police, who told him that Bruce had “a fifty–fifty chance of living” and that David was in a coma “and we don’t know if he’s going to come out of it.”

  When Bruce woke in the hospital, he had no recollection of what had happened. This was not unusual. “It’s like a short-circuit thing where your memory cuts off to protect you from what you went through,” he said. “I didn’t even know I was in a car accident. They told me I was in a car accident. They didn’t tell me I was with Bucky. They kept it a secret that Bucky was in [the car], they said, ‘Okay, you were in an accident with your roommate, and he’s in the hospital, too, and he looks like he’s going to recover,’ but they didn’t tell me any more.… In that moment all of a sudden I felt so bad about the accident, and the fact that I had put my [roommate’s life in danger]—and I didn’t even know how bad he was—and for one second, I had the thought, Oh God, I don’t want to be here right now. And at that moment, I left my body, and died, and went to the tunnel of white light, and I saw little angels in the tunnel, and they were pulling me toward the light, further and further. And I said, No, no, I don’t want to. I want to go back and help the world. And as soon as I had that thought, I came back into my body. And by the way, when you’re in that place, it’s so beautiful and so blissful you don’t want to come back. It’s the best feeling you’ve ever had. But I came back, and I came into my body, and I had tubes up my nose, my hands were tied down, and blood was all caked over my face, and I pried my eyes open and I saw my parents, my older brother, John, looking down at me. And I felt so high, higher than a kite, after that experience, but they were looking at me like I was—there were just tears in their eyes because I’m looking a mess. I used to be a handsome kid, and my face was all totally shattered, and I’m just almost dead.”

  Despite the extent of his injuries, Bruce healed quickly, within a month or so. He has a scar from below his navel to his neck. “They opened him all the way up,” his friend Hugh Jones remembered. “He had the internal bleeding and just crushed everything.” On the day he was to be released from the hospital, Bruce insisted on seeing David. Confined to his wheelchair, he was wheeled by nurses into David’s room. “That was the first time I knew that he was in a coma, and he might not come back,” he said. “And that’s where I, you know…” He started crying as he recalled the memory. “I felt such shame, and such remorse, and I felt so bad, because I knew that I was responsible,” he continued. “And we were both drinking, and we were both going crazy, but I was the one driving and it was my responsibility, and I was to blame.”

  He quickly realized he could not possibly spend the summer working for George H. W. Bush in New Hampshire. A life in politics no longer seemed right, or even possible. “That was the end of my political ambition,” he said. “It just completely switched me in a different direction. I didn’t even think about politics after that. I was like, No, I’m done. That’s not me.”

  * * *

  DESPITE BRUCE’S WARM MEMORIES of his relationship with David, there were lawsuits. David sued both Bruce and Justus O’Brien in Tompkins County, New York. O’Brien recalled that David was seeking $2 million from the defendants. Bruce’s father argued to let the lawyers fight it out with the insurance company. “Don’t you fight it out with Bucky,” his father told him. Bruce took his father’s advice.

  During the pendency of the lawsuit, Bruce and David weren’t supposed to speak, per the instructions of their respective attorneys. “But Bucky and I never, ever had any animosity,” Bruce said. “I said [to him], ‘Hey, listen, tell your lawyers to get as much as they can. I hope you’re treated well, and you can make some money off this. That’s really not my concern. My concern as your friend and someone who cares about you [is] that you get 100 percent healthy, and you can do whatever you want to do with your life.’ I have always believed that, and I never, ever had any kind of animosity toward him at all. And my dad was so supportive in that regard. And he believed exactly the same thing. He said, ‘We will take care of it any way we can, and don’t worry about the lawsuit stuff.’”

  Bruce ended up being slapped with “driving while ability impaired,” a lesser charge than “driving while intoxicated.” He kept his driver’s license. He said the police’s evidence against him was hampered by the fact that they took a blood sample from him when he was unconscious and so he could not have given them his consent. In effect, he got off on a technicality. “I was obviously drunk by anybody’s standards,” he said. “But they had no case on me, I guess. I don’t know. The lawyers figured it out.”

  Bruce said he doesn’t recall much about the settlement with David, other than that the case was settled. “It was all fine,” he said. “It was all good. My dad never even blinked. He just said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ My dad never even kept me apprised of the details.” David Buck’s brother, Doug Buck, had a different view of the fairness of the MacWilliamses’ settlement. “Bullshit, their lawyers fought him tooth and nail and David was sick of the whole process and just wanted to end it,” he wrote in an email. “He ended the lawsuit way earlier than he should have for a pittance. I believe he settled for $275,000 and the lawyer took his share. I believe that was the amount Bruce’s lawyers first offered.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE MAY 1979 CAR ACCIDENT, the lives of David Buck and Bruce MacWilliams quickly diverged. Bruce returned to Cornell that fall and continued his studies in the liberal arts program. The summer after his junior year at Cornell, he took a gig painting a house in Newport, Rhode Island. He met up there with Hugh Jones, his friend from Cornell who had also taken a year off from the college before returning. The two undergrads designed and built a Colonial-style home at 77 Thames Street, in downtown Newport. Jones could see that the accident had changed Bruce. “He never drank after that,” he said. “He had meditated before that. He was into meditation, but he just really went full-on into the meditation after that.”

  Bruce then transferred to Columbia University, where he studied film. He recalled, “As soon as I started shooting with a motion picture camera, I said, Oh my God, this is what I should do with the rest of my life.… I’ve always been in film ever since.” He ended up with a degree from Cornell, in 1984—he had a choice between a Columbia degree and a Cornell degree and chose Cornell—and then set about making his first movie, Real Cowboy, which was set in the South Bronx and Bisbee, Arizona. He was twenty-seven years old. He showed it around and people seemed to like it and urged him to move to Los Angeles if he was serious about filmmaking. He settled in Santa Monica, where he lives today. He pays the bills for his wife and teenage son by directing commercials. He can’t say for certain whether he ever saw Bucky again. “I visited him once, I think, or twice,” he said.

  David Buck’s recovery from the car accident was very different from Bruce’s. He was transferred to Mass General Hospital, in Boston, to be closer to his mother. Our Andover classmate Phil Balshi remembered visiting David there. He remembered David being in the hospital for about a year. “I don’t think he could speak very well on my first visit,” Balshi recalled. On his second visit, Balshi said, David had regained some speech. He also thought,
at that early point, his friend had trouble walking and difficulty remembering people and places. “Being the gregarious guy he was, womanizer, whatever you want to call him, and being in that physical condition, I think must have been incredibly depressing for him,” he said. Eventually, David left Mass General and moved back home with his mother.

  On a few occasions, Hugh Jones drove up from Newport to see his friend, outside of Boston. Bucky was still recovering. “He was really foggy,” Jones said. “It was really hard seeing him then. He had to put it all back together. It was a lot.” His vision was particularly affected by the accident. “His eyes were terrible,” Jones continued. “He had these big funky glasses. He’d kind of lose his train of thought. A little bit of it was his personality because he was always a little—not spacy, but kind of nonchalant about things.” He remembered David walked with a limp and used a cane. “He was hurting.”

  Eventually, David recovered sufficiently from his injuries to return to Cornell and to graduate. But he could no longer handle the curriculum at the architecture school. “It took a long time to get back on his feet,” his brother explained, “and he couldn’t walk without being steadied. He stayed positive but was never the same.” One day, after she had graduated from Cornell, David’s college friend Jamie Lustberg ran into him in the architecture school. She had returned to campus to play in an alumni squash tournament. She was walking through the drawing studios when she heard someone say, “Hey, Punky,” the nickname David had given to her. She turned and saw him. “He was suffering, I could tell,” she said. “It was very bittersweet. He was happy to see me but … something was missing, something was missing … It was almost like he had been rebuilt.” Lustberg remembered he had scars on his face and that he just seemed generally frustrated—with the architecture school, with getting things done, with even walking around. “He was four years older, at least, than all his classmates,” she said. “He was not doing well.”